I just pushed a fix for a bug that made DrRacket extremely sluggish on my laptop. Most everything was slow, but typing in the find and replace fields was particularly bad -- each character would take about a second to appear on screen.
The problem turned out to be that my framework preferences file was enormous, a problem since DrRacket saves your preferences very frequently. In particular, it saved them on each keystroke in the find and replace fields. (But no more. See http://bit.ly/eQmhOH) My preferences file was enormous because, due to a bug, it had accumulated more than three years of REPL history. I no longer have the ballooned file, but IIRC, it was tens of thousands of expressions, totaling a few MB of text. To help spot issues like this one, Robby and I have added a little "P" indicator near the GC icon that turns on when the preferences file is being saved. If the P flashes rapidly (as it would have when you typed in the find or replace fields) or stays on for a while (as it would have if your preferences file were large), it may indicate a performance problem. The P won't appear at all unless you're running a nightly build or building from git. _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://lists.racket-lang.org/listinfo/dev
